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Brent Baker is the Steven P.J. Wood Senior Fellow and Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center (MRC), the publisher of NewsBusters. He’s been the central figure in the MRC’s News Analysis Division since the MRC’s 1987 founding and in 2005 spearheaded the launch of NewsBusters.

Baker oversees the selection of the award nominees and “winners” for the MRC’s “DisHonors Awards,” presented at an annual gala, and each week he helps the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard select a “Mainstream Media Scream.” Those picks are added, on a one week delay, to NewsBusters. (Archive for 2012-2014 on MRC.org)

An avid fan of the Washington Capitals NHL hockey team, in January of 2009 the Washington Post's "DC Sports Bog" took note of Baker's attendance at a Caps game with John Kerry: "The Caps, John Kerry and a Scourge."

Baker lived in Massachusetts through high school, whereupon he fled the liberal commonwealth for George Washington University in DC and, since graduation, a life in Northern Virginia. Full bio on MRC.org.

Catching up with a fun few minutes from Wednesday night, the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes went on a tear after those who forced former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to withdraw as commencement speaker at New Jersey’s Rutgers University.

After a clip of student charging “this woman has committed so many crimes,” Hayes declared during the panel segment on FNC’s Special Report with Bret Baier: “This is what happens when you have the morons in charge.”

In a just-released survey conducted in late 2013, of 1,080 television network, print and online journalists, 28 percent self-identified as Democrats and only one-fourth as many, a piddling seven percent, called themselves Republican. That four-to-one disparity is up from two-to-one (36 to 18 percent) in the same poll taken in 2002, as the share of Republicans has plunged by 11 points.

The numbers come from “The American Journalist in the Digital Age,” the latest in a decennial poll of journalists conducted, since the early 1970s, by the School of Journalism at Indiana University.

Joel McHale, the comedy performer at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered some zingers at the cable networks, the President and Democrats, but reserved his political invective for Republicans, the only group whose motivations he impugned – specifically, as racists.

His very first joke: “Good evening Mr. President — or, as Paul Ryan would call you, another inner city minority taking advantage of the federal government to feed and house your family.”

Columnist Charles Krauthammer contended, on Thursday’s Special Report with Bret Baier, that the release of the Ben Rhodes memo has changed the media dynamic in interest toward the Benghazi scandal because journalists are now “embarrassed” over being “rolled” by the White House:

“What’s changed now, and we saw it in the briefing room, is I think the other media are somewhat embarrassed by the fact that, unlike Fox, they allowed themselves to be stoned and spun and rolled for a year and a half and now the memo appears and it’s obvious that they missed the story.”

Sounding remarkably like American liberals and journalists at the time – not to be redundant – last week’s episode of FX’sThe Americans set in the early 1980s (a new episode runs tonight), included a scene in which a KGB operative, working in the United States, sputtered in disgust at President Ronald Reagan on her TV: “Look at him. He’ll do anything. He doesn’t care. Kids, nuns, journalists -- he doesn’t care.”

That came from “Elizabeth Jennings,” played by Keri Russell, as she watched Reagan speak on TV, a speech I figured out was delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) dinner held at the Mayflower hotel on Friday, February 26, 1982.

The sci-fi “dramatic conspiracy thriller,” Orphan Black, in which actress Tatiana Maslany (IMDB page) plays the parts of five clones (so far), has its second season debut tonight on BBC America in the United States and on Space in Canada (both at 9 PM EDT Saturday night).

In an episode during its first season, “Sarah Manning” visits the mother in Toronto who adopted her to learn of her childhood in Brixton, England, during the 1980s. The mother tells her: “England was burning. Maggie Thatcher firing on all barrels – at Ireland, the Falklands. She sacked social security, went after the immigrants, the poor, unions.”

On Wednesday morning, December 12, 2012, Jenna Bush Hager, the daughter of former President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, announced on NBC’s Today show that she was expecting. That evening, the NBC Nightly News allocated 33 seconds to the revelation while neither ABC’s World News nor the CBS Evening News bothered to mention it.

Today (Thursday, April 17), Chelsea Clinton, daughter of a President and First Lady belonging to the media’s preferred party, announced at a Clinton Global Initiative event in New York City that she is pregnant – and the networks broke out the baby showers in joy.

From the April 2 Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, a Fallon monologue illustrated by some local Milwaukee television news with a surprising twist about Hank, a stray dog who has become a mascot for the Brewers baseball team.

Jane Pauley, who, while campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008, declared “I want to see the cool, steady hand of Barack Obama on that Bible on Inauguration Day,” has joined CBS News as a contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning. She also gushed back in 2008: “Not only could Barack Obama be a good President, he’d be an exceptional one. And I so look forward to it.”

“The Secret Service is currently seeking bids for a new presidential limousine,” FNC’s Bret Baier explained at the end of his Tuesday show, setting up a clip from CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman, which “got a sneak peek at some of the required features for the next so-called ‘beast.’”

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is married to ABC News Washington correspondent Claire Shipman and now there’s another cozy media-Democratic political world power couple with the marriage, in Arizona over the weekend, of Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie to Clinton-Gore political operative Michael Feldman, founder of a Democratic PR/lobbying firm.

Guthrie was a White House correspondent for NBC News, covering President Obama, and co-host of MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, until heading north to New York City in 2011 to take a role on the Today show where she’s been co-hosting with Matt Lauer since mid-2012.

A couple of weeks ago, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford flew down to Los Angeles to appear on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live – where Kimmel confronted him with sets of photos showing the very different approaches to his job and constituents compared to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Some pretty humorous contrasting pictures in this clip from Kimmel’s March 4 program.

Tonight’s (March 14)Blue Bloods on CBS (10 PM EDT/PDT) will center a plot around the “knockout game,” in which assailants whack people on the back of the head to knock them unconscious and then rob them, a crime which MSNBC and the left have mocked the Fox News Channel for covering. The CBS drama stars Tom Selleck, as New York City Police Commissioner “Frank Reagan,” and Donnie Wahlberg, as his son, “Detective Danny Reagan.”

Video after the jump of the promo, for the March 14 episode, “Knockout Game,” run at the end of last Friday’s episode.

In a fun feature on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, “Lie Witness News,” he sends a camera crew out onto the streets of Los Angeles to ask pedestrians about events that have not happened. But the people are too embarrassed or ill-informed to realize the fake-out and offer their opinions on the non-existent premise.

Monday’s (March 3) Special Report with Bret Baier ended with an excerpt from an “Oscars Edition,” proving, Baier explained, how “the locals were not exactly well-versed on this year’s top flicks.” Painful hilarity ensues.

Bret Baier opened a panel segment on his show Friday night with a flashback to President Barack Obama’s snide ridiculing, of Mitt Romney’s now seeming prescient concern about Russia’s “geo-political” threat, during the October 22, 2012 presidential debate. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the cold war has been over for 20 years,” Obama lectured.

Season 2 debuts tonight of The Americans, the FX drama centered around husband and wife KGB undercover agents (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as “Philip and Elizabeth Jennings”) who live with their kids as ordinary Americans in suburban Washington, DC when Reagan becomes President.

In the next to last episode of the first season, at a scene in a restaurant sometime in 1982, a source tells “Elizabeth” she can trust a U.S. Colonel, who wants to pass on information about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), because “he’s completely disillusioned with the Chicken Hawks in the Reagan administration.”

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